The Aura of Art After the Advent of the Digital

Abstract

‘To articulate what is past does not mean to find “what it really was”. It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger’ (Benjamin, 1971b, p.197) writes Benjamin in his sixth theses on the Philosophy of History. In a similar vain it is not so compelling today to try to seize from the past the meaning of Benjamin’s concept of aura, but conversely it is time to address the cultural concerns that are enshrouded in auratic nebulae. Thus, to rethink Benjamin’s concept of aura cannot be an analysis of the pertinence or of the efficacy of the term in contemporary media. It can neither be assigned to a project of readjusting aura conceptually, in order to engage critically with our media environment. We are entangled with media, which plays a role far more intrusive than Benjamin could ever conceive, and the dual relationship he sought to describe between medium and art has become more and more blurred — more ‘atmospheric’ in Benjamin’s terms. Therefore, tracing auratic schemas in the early 21^st century has a certain task of apprehending the particular relations of this more atmospheric and ubiquitous mediatic environment. The word ‘relations’ is a congener to the cognitive genus of aura: aura denotes an affinity, a feeling, and even an existential flow that can be less thought and more possibly enacted.